Steph Curry frustrated over mediocre start: ‘I’m sick of talking about it. We just have to do it.’

Featured games of the Golden State Warriors

Golden State Warriors’ Stephen Curry (30) grimaces in pain after he was fouled in the second quarter of a NBA game against the Portland Trail Blazers at Chase Center in San Francisco, Calif., on Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2023.© Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group/TNS

The Warriors arrived in Phoenix with a troubling 10-12 record at a crucial point.

A team, a Hall of Fame core, that’s already carved out a distinguished place in NBA history is grappling with its identity. Steph Curry, Draymond Green, Klay Thompson, Steve Kerr are on a mission to prove that they still run this league, but are stumbling too much not to raise questions about their vitality.

The motion offense has often looked stale. Players outside of Curry haven’t been able to close a significant scoring gap.

Through the first 22 games, the Warriors haven’t dominated any facet of the game. They are what their record is, as Kerr put it, with some faith that all the ways they can succeed on paper will come to fruition.

But how many more stumbles until the Warriors call it? The season is only a quarter-way through, but the season may be swirling the toilet if this mediocrity continues through the winter. Curry seems to see the big picture.

“Got to figure out how to stop talking about it and do it, otherwise you’ll be into the new year with the same problems,” Curry told reporters in Oklahoma City.

“Whatever it is, if it’s within our control, we have to do it if we are going to be a serious team. I’m sick of talking about it, too. We just have to do it.”

“It,” in this case, means crystalizing an identity. With Chris Paul in tow, Golden State entered the season positioned as the smartest team in the room, the pedigreed organization with the savvy to force younger teams into mistakes and flubs.

Curry, even in his mid-30s, can still lead a team to the mountaintop. He’s still the face of the NBA and a proven maestro in high-stakes games.

Save for Curry’s heroics, that identity hasn’t shown itself much. Often the veterans have been the ones making head-scratching mistakes and victims of their own emotion; the older guys are at the center of a dismal 15.8% turnover rate, Green has twice been ejected and also was suspended for five games.

Veterans take the blame for this tepid start.

“I don’t feel the urgency we need to have, and that’s on me,” Green said on Friday. “I will be better about that, making sure guys have the urgency that they need.

It hasn’t been there and you can’t claim to lead in that department when it’s going well so I take that on the chin and make sure this team plays with better sense of urgency, and I will.”

Slightly alarming is coaches and players’ propensity to hang onto moral victories. Sure, they’ve lost each of their last three road games, but all three have been by a combined four points — the first time that’s happened to Golden State.

The silver lining is that they’re controlling most games against good and bad teams, the cloud is that they lack composure to maintain the lead.

Playing the shoulda-coulda-woulda game, a few things go differently and the Warriors are up a few games in the win column. Only three wins separate them from the 11th seed, where they currently sit, from the third seed, where the 13-8 Dallas Mavericks sit.

“Right now it’s just about winning games,” Curry said. “You can’t let too much of this early part of the year go by without getting some type of safety net in the standings.

As you work through some of the kinks we have to work through and get to full strength, you don’t want to be chasing come the new year and February.

It’s hard enough to win on a nightly basis, let along make a late-season charge with that kind of pressure. Every game is important, for sure. We’re approaching it that way it just isn’t turning into wins.

“You get over .500 and built momentum, it can change the vibe of your team really quickly because winning cures a lot of frustrations.”

The season is early, there’s plenty of time for a vibe change. But how this next month goes could determine if all their pieces make a whole worth keeping together before the trade deadline in February.

In the next month, it will be determined if the Warriors can contend as is, if they should pursue flipping some of their movable contracts — such as Paul or Thompson — for another scorer or just stop running.

“No other team in the NBA isn’t dealing with the things we’re dealing with,” Green told reporters. “You have to be mentally strong enough to figure it out. Those who do, win. Those that don’t lose close games.

“We got all the pieces that we need to win You look at some of the game we’re losing, we have to tighten up in the margins. But we know what it takes to win a championship and we have all those things.”